Yesterday I interviewed Scott Rosenberg at length for the Rumpus, and we spent a lot of time talking about the news industry and how it relates to online publishing, with special reference to blogging.

At one point he said (to paraphrase) “the news business has been in decline since the early 80s, and though it has accelerated in recent years, the decline itself is not a new thing.”

“There can be no argument that the blog format gives ‘now’ the pride of place; novelty leads, and the past recedes into a string of ‘older posts’ links and archives pages. But it is a mistake to think that blogs therefore discard the past…

“It’s reasonable to suspect that a medium organized by reverse chronology may not be the place to turn for the virtues of the timeless.

Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon who has written a fascinating history of blogging (in time, we’ll be interviewing him about his book), recently wrote up his thoughts on Twitter in two posts: how Twitter differs from blogging, how it has changed blogging, and where he sees the platform going from here.

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